1. Field
The present disclosure relates to an electronic binder having an indexing system for different elements (e.g., portions, components, and the like) of the same or different file types (e.g., text files, spreadsheet files, and the like) to allow indexing at a more granular level than the file level. In this manner, multiple elements from a single file or electronic document may be indexed independently. For the sake of clarity and ease of understanding, references will be made to tax documents and the field of tax preparation or the accounting industry. However, one of ordinary skill in the art will understand that the concepts described herein are applicable to any number of different fields, including, but not limited to indexing any number of business documents, personal documents, or any combination thereof.
2. Description of the Related Art
Currently, Adobe® Acrobat® offers the capability to merge a group of source documents, and to organize documents via bookmarking. More particularly, Acrobat® documents are saved in PDF format and allow the user to merge one PDF file with another PDF file. The user may also create bookmark categories and bookmark names, move bookmarks and even pages to organize the pages of the document to be in the same order as the bookmarks for the PDF file. However, these features of Adobe® Acrobat® are very cumbersome and time consuming to use as they require multiple steps to be executed properly. Furthermore, Adobe® Acrobat® is restrictive in that the user is required to convert all files (e.g., text files, spreadsheet files, and the like) to a PDF file prior to merging, and once converted, the documents can no longer be maintained or edited in their native application. Accordingly, users are not provided the ability to organize files easily and efficiently, which are crucial to the profitability of many businesses. Accordingly, what is needed is a document element indexing system that may provide organizational advantages superior to what is currently offered in the industry.